News

How do nature and nurture interact in shaping emotional, social and mental health? As a way to highlight important new research directions in the area, assistant professor Claudia Haase chaired a conference called “New Frontiers in Gene-Environment Research” on March 14 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

SESP assistant professor Terri Sabol and her colleagues found that the Video Assessment of Interaction and Learning (VAIL) could reliably predict teachers’ abilities to identify effective interactions between teachers and students. The teachers with this skill then tended to actually have more effective interactions with students in their classrooms, the study found.

Brian Hurley (MS10), Faisal Mohyuddin (MS03) and Hina Patel (MS06) — all graduates of SESP’s Master of Science in Education program — were selected as 2014-15 Teachers for Global Classrooms Fellows by the U.S. Department of State. Their international field experiences are in Republic of Georgia, Uganda and Morocco, respectively.

Toby Bolsen, James N. Druckman and Fay Lomax Cook state in their op ed in the Washington Post that the "politicization of climate science" leads to citizen uncertainty — even though "there is a clear scientific consensus about the reality of human-induced global warming."

SESP assistant professor Danny M. Cohen (PhD11), who specializes in the design of Holocaust and human rights education, wrote a young adult novel for use in school curriculums. He will be discussing his book, Train, at a campus-wide April 16 event for Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Rapid technological advances are revolutionizing work in science, mathematics and complex theories. To introduce the powers of agent-based computer modeling for investigating complex problems, SESP learning sciences professor Uri Wilensky has written a new book called An Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling.

New research by assistant professor Claudia Haase suggests that people become more trusting as they get older. "People really seem to be 'growing to trust' as they travel through their adult years," Haase says about the study, featured on ABC-TV Channel 7.

Paulo Blikstein (PhD09), founder of the Transformative Learning Technologies Lab at Stanford University, researched a way to gauge in real-time how students learn computer science. For future classrooms, instructors may be able to see how well their students are learning — as the material is being taught — and then adjust lessons in real-time to meet better the needs of their students.

Three SESP students were awarded grants by the Office of Undergraduate Research during winter quarter. Abby Durgan and Nick Medrano received Conference Travel Grants, and Daniel Isaacson won an Undergraduate Language Grant.

Megan Bang (PhD09), a graduate of the SESP Learning Sciences program, is the 2015 recipient of two awards from the American Education Research Association. She is assistant professor of education at the University of Washington in Seattle.

SESP undergraduate students Alex Cohen and Nia Coffey helped the Northwestern women’s basketball team sail into the semifinals of the Big Ten tournament on Saturday — for the first time ever in program history.

At the National Science Teachers Association conference, SESP professor Brian Reiser described the new NGSS science standards as a "shift from learning about something to figuring out something." Students are given a big question, a "mystery" to investigate.

When professor James Spillane gave the keynote address at the Queensland Principals Conference in Australia, 1,350 principals from across the state of Queensland heard his talk. Spillane spoke to the school leaders about leading and managing instructional innovation in Australia.

Middle-aged Americans who show high levels of societal involvement and mental health are especially likely to construe their lives as stories of personal redemption, according to new research by professor Dan McAdams published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

In the SESP Adulthood and Aging class, students delve into theories and research about adult development. However, at an “intergenerational exchange” where they actually hear older people’s stories, their learning truly comes to life.

Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy ranks number seven in the nation, according to the new 2016 ranking of graduate schools of education by U.S. News & World Report. SESP consistently ranks among the top graduate schools nationwide.

Joe Curnow (BS05), a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, is the winner of the Vanier Graduate Scholarship, Canada’s largest doctoral award. The award supports her current research into the engagement of youth in social movements.

Testing, standards, accountability, teacher quality, achievement gap — education issues concern many citizens today. To share insights and research findings about current issues, 10 SESP faculty members are pitching in to teach a continuing education class at Northwestern this spring.

For School of Education and Social Policy undergraduates who want to lead extracurricular projects, the SESP Opportunities Fund can help them make a difference. This spring, several leadership events — including a global health event, an entrepreneurship competition and college scholarships— are being supported by the fund, which is intended to encourage undergraduate innovation and service.

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) recently named SESP professor Cynthia Coburn an AERA Fellow. Coburn is one of 23 scholars to become 2015 AERA Fellows in recognition of exceptional scientific or scholarly contributions to education research.